Joy and anger after 69th Assembly vote

A laptop computer on a corner table showed Daly with a commanding lead over four opponents in the 69th Assembly district primary. Daly, sipping a bottle of Corona beer, and his supporters — including Assemblyman Jose Solorio — were relaxed and convivial.

A few miles away, at a union hall in Orange, Tefere Gebre was also drinking Corona, though his mood was far less sanguine. Speaking to two reporters, Gebre, executive director of the Orange County Federation of Labor, launched an expletive-heavy denunciation of Solorio, the termed-out legislator whom Daly and the other candidates were seeking to replace.

"Jose Solorio is dead to me," Gebre said, in one of his few lines that didn't include an f-bomb.

The two scenes seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the primary campaign, in which labor broke from its role as an "ATM" – to use Gebre's term – for business-friendly Democrats like Solorio. Gebre and Nick Berardino, head of the Orange County Employees Association, channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to back Julio Perez, a first-time candidate who vowed to stand for the working class.

Meanwhile, business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, channeled hundreds of thousands more to support Daly, whom Solorio praised as a "moderate, pro-job" Democrat.

Daly and Perez might have faced each other in a November runoff, but one man stood in the way – or rather, sat in the way might be more accurate, since Jose "Joe" Moreno, the only Republican in the contest, did not actively campaign, received no monetary contributions, and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his name from the ballot.

Moreno sought to withdraw after learning that he might be in violation of a federal law that bars some public employees from seeking elected office. Moreno works for Orange County's Social Services Agency.

Nevertheless, as Tuesday night turned into Wednesday, with most of the ballots counted, Moreno stood in second place, several hundred votes ahead of Perez. That bald fact was projected on a big screen in the union hall where Gebre was fulminating against Solorio.

Gebre was displeased with Solorio's voting record on labor issues after labor backed Solorio's successful initial Assembly campaign in 2006. "We have nothing to do with corporate whores," Gebre said.

Back at the Daly event in Anaheim, the night's results were seen as affirmation of the "moderate" character of district, which includes most of Santa Ana, a swath of central Anaheim, and slivers of Garden Grove and Orange. There are about 78,000 registered Democrats in the district, to about 43,000 Republicans.

"If we can't elect a moderate Democrat in Orange County, we have problems," Solorio said.

In a phone conversation Wednesday, Solorio responded to some of Gebre's invective. "Sometimes we're going to disagree in the political arena, but I think it's important that people maintain some level of civility in our democracy," Solorio said. "That's vital."

Solorio said his labor voting record is "very typical" compared to other Democrats, adding "I'm in sync with the job and education priorities of working families in my district."

Perez said throughout the campaign that getting new voters to the polls would be a key to his chances in a district with many foreign-born residents and a history of sparse voter turnout.

It appeared that turnout was especially low: Daly, the leader, had 8,231 votes, out of a total of 20,027 that were counted by late Wednesday.

There remained an estimated 7,800 uncounted mail-in and provisional ballots in the 69th district, said Neal Kelley, Registrar of Voters. Kelley said he hopes to have all those ballots counted within seven working days.

Given those numbers, Perez was still holding out hope Wednesday. "Who knows, in 3 weeks I could come in first," he said in a Facebook post.